[Numpy-discussion] Deprecate chararray [was Plea for help]

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Travis Oliphant<oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 20, 2009, at 2:04 PM, David Cournapeau wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Christopher
>> Hanley<chanley at stsci.edu> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Another concern is that we told people coming from numarray to use
>>> this module.  It is my opinion that at this point in the numpy
>>> release
>>> cycle that an API change needs a very strong justification.
>>> Anecdotes
>>> about the number of users, a "change or die" philosophy, and an un-
>>> articulated notion of  "the spirit of numpy"  do not in my
>>> consideration meet that high bar.
>>
>> I agree those are not strong reasons without more backing.  What
>> worries me the most, in both numpy and scipy, is code that nobody
>> knows about, without any test or documentation. When it breaks, we
>> can't fix it. That's unsustainable in the long term, because it takes
>> a lot of time that people could spend somewhere else more useful.
>> Especially when you have C code which does not work on some platforms,
>> with new version of python (python 3k port, for example).
>
>
> The claim that "chararray" is not understood is not true.   I know
> about the code.  It's not that difficult of a piece of code.   It's
> utility can be questioned, but it was and may still be an important
> part of Numarray compatibilty.

I did not want to imply that chararray is unknown, sorry for the confusion.

I just wanted to say that old code is not an argument to remove
something. Whether someone is willing to maintain it is a much better
argument IMO.

cheers,

David